


Show-Stopper

by Bool_Ji



Category: Dark Souls
Genre: Basically Artorias Pulls An American Psycho, Gen, High School AU, Horror AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-29
Updated: 2014-09-29
Packaged: 2018-02-19 06:39:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2378534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bool_Ji/pseuds/Bool_Ji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arty doesn’t remember what happens when his darkness comes...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Show-Stopper

**Author's Note:**

> My half of a fic-art trade with tumblr user ask-artorias (ask-artorias.tumblr.com). She requested a drabble of her AU, and this is what I delivered.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

If I must die  
I will encounter darkness as a bride,  
And hug it in mine arms.  
—William Shakespeare, Measure For Measure

Let’s face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.  
—Stephen King

\- - -

Fame finds you like a wind in the doldrums. Your ship may be marooned for weeks, but all it takes is one gust to blow you to safety. Sanctuary, in this case, are the music charts. Your single, Soul For Sale, has sat princely upon the number one spot for weeks. Your album, The Abyss, sells more and more copies every day. You can’t even fathom how many times it’s been downloaded. You’re proud of your work, because—

_They’re not listening to harmony and rhyme_ , Arty thinks,  _They’ve got rivers of my_ blood _pouring out of their earbuds into their brains. They’re tuning into_ part of me _. Can you dig it, soul brotha?_

The Prius is hideously underpowered, especially compared to his ocean blue Challenger, but Arty’s on a stealth mission, and the hybrid is quiet. It’s a quick in-and-out job. Takes all of two hours. No one back at the hotel will notice, not a technician, not a groupie. He’ll be back before sunrise, steal a bit of sleep, have brandy with breakfast (or  _for_  breakfast, he’s not picky), and hit the road again. There’s five hundred miles between here and New York City, and he has a show tomorrow night. Sold-out show, no less. Yeah, he can dig it.

But he’s not thinking about the fans or the roadies or the asphalt. All he cares about right now is the school coming together beneath the glare of the headlights. Arthur “Arty” Orias pulls to the side of the road, parks, kills the car, and gets out.

Nora Dolon High. It was a dump back then, and time hasn’t been kind. In the dark it looks like a slumbering dragon riddled with cancer, lumps and corridors, angles and tumors of foliage. Chain-link fence surrounds the perimeter.  _Laying siege_ , Arty thinks. Arms crossed over his chest, the singer sizes up his next move.

For the longest time, he’s had a melody in his head. He’s tried to strum it out on guitar, tease it free on piano, tattoo it onto crumpled sheets of paper at three in the morning with two packets of cigarettes worth of smoke inundating the room, a bottle of Jack in his belly, wearing nothing but his underwear and his wolf tooth necklace. Nothing helps alleviate the song, and so it runs through him and he can feel it in his blood, burning, radioactive, and he will do anything to get it out,  _get it out, GET IT OUT—_

Arty doesn’t remember what happens when his darkness comes, but his manager does.

"For Christ’s sake," Kaathe mutters, flipping through in-voices, "We’re going to be barred from every hotel chain in America."

_Your mustache is retarded_ , Arty thinks in reply, but doesn’t speak. Stupid facial hair aside, Kaathe makes his shit go away, and thus is indispensable.

Doesn’t mean he has to listen to him. Arty’s too preoccupied with that dirty, niggling song. It’s gotten worse the closer he’s come here, to the point he hears it on the wind, feels it under his boots. Nora Dolon High. It’s not a school or a dragon, it’s an enormous speaker, and only he can hear its siren’s call.

"Time to pull the plug," Arty murmurs, getting the bolt cutter from the backseat.

There’s a hole in the fence he can squirm through easily enough. Armed as he is, the padlock on the main office door still gives him pause.  _Used to call this place NORAD_ , he thinks,  _Felt like going to school in a military base._  How many times has he prayed this entire fucking state would be nuked into glass, only for the campus to survive like a cockroach? Enough times to fill the margins of his notebooks with angst-drenched lyrics about fallout and gas masks. Crap, all of it, but it’d been the start of a high-octane music career.

Arty snips through the lock, and he’s in.

Ten years of dust and debris litters the linoleum floor. Arty pulls a flashlight from his coat pocket, shines it down the hall. The walls are a dull gray, the ceiling is discolored and rotting, mouse turds lie everywhere. The front desk is empty. The singer treads carefully, dirt crunching beneath his feet. Trekking through a doorway, he spots termites marching along lanes in the wood.

"Cool," he says aloud, "I’m walking through a corpse."

His own voice is almost unbearably loud in the tomb-like silence. Why did they close this place down again? Was it the bugs? They’d just have fumed the place, wouldn’t they? Close the school down for a few days to much student rejoicing. Must’ve been money. Principal embezzling too much to fuel his used panty fetish or something.

"Moneeey, so they say," Arty sings, "Is the root of all evil toooday. But if you ask for a raise, it’s no surprise that they’re giving none away." He smirks at a filthy display of tarnished trophies. "Can you dig it, soul brotha?"

The initial unease has worn off as his ears adjusted to the quiet. You know, this  _is_  cool. His songs are about the shadowy side of the spirit. He’s filmed music videos in places like this: abandoned hospitals, deserted factories, caverns. He touches fingertips together, playing an imaginary saxophone. God, why didn’t he have the foresight to bring the horn with him? If he had, he could finally get that damn song out of his—

—ugh. It’s started up again. Or was it always there?

"I was in the right," Arty says, "Yes, absolutely in the right! I certainly was in the right!" Such good music, Pink Floyd, should cover the song, cover the song and drown it out,  _drown it out, DROWN IT—_

He stumbles onto an open classroom. The desks are still neatly arranged. Posters still hang on the walls, their colors faded. If there was a lesson on the chalkboard, ten years of gravity have yanked it loose.

A phone sits on a tabletop. It’s a Nokia with a keypad that slides up into the display. The pinnacle of cellular technology in 2002, now useful only as a paperweight. This particular model is pastel pink, and as Arty picks it off the dust, he knows he’ll find a bee sticker on the back, because—

"This belonged to Ciaran. She never would have left this here."

He can see her in his mind’s eye. Blonde hair, blue eyes, a mouth full of metal and rubber bands. The school belle, to coin a phrase, one every boy and a few girls lusted for. Did she toy with them? Yes, probably, and she could get away with it because she had a personality as spotless as her complexion. Volunteer at the animal shelter, Girl Scout, apple of the librarian’s eye.

Did he love her? Of course, but—

_Not the way your average teenage guy did._  Arty tucks the phone in his pocket. His feet find their way out of the classroom, following that damnable song. It’s buzzing in his mind like a radio channel mired in static. He drifts in search of better reception.  _Cared less about getting my dick wet_ , he thinks,  _And more about getting the words out of me. Figuring out what worked and what didn’t. A lot of stuff was trash back then, but there were some diamonds buried in the shit. Polished one of those gems into Backpedal, and Backpedal got a producer’s attention, and—_

A locker stands open amidst its brethren. Some animal has made a nest of paper and twigs at the bottom, and rust scars its surface. A letterman jacket, moth-eaten and moldy, hangs on a hook.

_Jesus Christ._

He knows what name will be stitched on the shoulder even though he doesn’t touch the filthy thing. _ORNSTEIN_ , in red cursive on gold cloth, and on the back,  _Go Lions!_  The jacket, in its day, may well have been Superman’s cape. Brawn  _and_  brains — pianist by day, actor in the evenings, star lacrosse player at night. One hundred percent naturally red hair.

"I used to write about your goddamn hair," Arty mutters, reaching for a sleeve, "I would look up redheads in the library and compare them to you. Achilles, Judas, Thor—"

His fingers close on a cuff and fresh blood squelches onto his skin.

Arty shouts in horror, nearly dropping the flashlight as he

_backpedals_

away from the locker. Heart lodged in his throat, he casts the glow on his hand—

—it’s clean. Nothing but white flesh and guitar string calluses.

Arty believes in ghosts. True to image, he’s hosted seances, and behind the incense smoke and navy blue cloth he’s seen something black and immense and as ancient as the stars. And it has seen him too.

_It’s always been about the dark_ , he thinks,  _Music soothes the savage beast — can you dig it, soul brotha? Lyrics are spells and instruments are the wailing congregation and I’m your high priest, baby, I know exactly where your heart lies and I’m going to—_

Someone is playing music deeper in the school, and Arty recognizes the tune.

His feet lead the way, because his brain is too busy clawing furrows into the floor as he’s dragged along.  _It’s a ploy, it’s a trick, that’s not me playing the song, that’s the dark! The dark is using my magic against me! Stop it,_  stop it, STOP IT—

His body is deaf to his pleas. His pace picks up until he’s running through piles of raccoon dung and mildew. He knows he’s bearing his teeth like an animal, he knows his hair hangs stringy in his eyes, and he knows when his hands find the double doors to the gym it will open onto

\- - -

senior prom, 2004. Pink and purple spotlights, punch bowl, streamers and sparkles, ties and high heels, flower petals.

Music fills the air, and Arty, seventeen, revels in it.

_"Lose your blues, everybody cut footloose!"_

"I don’t know where I’ll go from here," Leon Ornstein says to a pack of his teammates, smiling sheepishly. His prom king crown sits crooked on a nest of ginger. "I have scholarships, sure, but I don’t wanna be a student anymore. I want to lead people, y’know? Maybe I’ll join the army."

"Ornstein!"

The lacrosse captain frowns. “Art, dude. What’s up?”

Arty, pale beneath a scraggly teenage beard, points toward the locker room. “Some chick’s having a reaction to something, man. She can’t breathe, man, you gotta help me!”

Cursing lowly, Ornstein hands off his crown to a friend and trots across the gym. Arty stays on his heels. “For fuck’s sake, Art, I’m not a nurse!”

That he’s going to her aid even as the words pass his lips makes Arty’s heart swell.

The girls’ locker room is empty. The door pulls shut behind them. The prom king starts to turn. “What the hell is—”

Grabbing a handful of that beautiful red hair, Arty wrenches Ornstein’s head back and drags the knife across his throat.

The spray of crimson is just as pretty as he’d hoped it would be, splattering the linoleum. Ornstein tries to gasp in shock, inhales his own blood, dissolves into wet wheezes as he collapses onto the floor. His suit soaks up his own fluids, tears, snot — he’s peed himself, Arty’s delighted to note. It’s taking him longer to die than he thought, but that’s fine. Music’s on his side.

_"You can fly if you only cut loose!"_

"Why’d you stop hanging out with me?" Arty asks, "You’re amazing, you know. You’re the epitome of high school male: smart, strong, enough charisma to choke a horse. Didn’t you like the songs I wrote for you? You did! You really did, but you stopped! Why, man? Why’d you stop?"

If Ornstein has an answer for him, it’s

_cut short_

by the dimming light in his eyes and the meaty divide in his neck. He crumples onto his side, still pouring blood, and expires.

Arty flicks red off his knife. Stainless steel, pilfered from the cafeteria. Slices through windpipes like butter, can you dig it, soul brotha?

The door opens, and Ciaran, prom queen, peers inside. “Leon?”

_Encore, encore!_  Arty thinks.

He grabs her wrist and throws her into the room. She hits the floor hard, knocking the wind from her lungs and the crown from her head. Arty closes the door as she catches sight of her king lying lifeless in a pool of his own blood, and slams her back against a locker, hand over her mouth before she can scream.

"Hush, my darling, don’t fear, my darling," Arty sings, smiling, "The lion sleeps toniiight."

Ciaran’s breath is so warm against his palm, her eyes so wide. Arty almost wishes he could take a picture, capture her so raw and vulnerable. His other hand strokes her leg, and he reminds himself he’s only taking out the garbage. In the gym, the speakers still shriek.

_"Everybody cut footloose!"_

"Wrong lyrics, I’m sorry," Arty says, shaking his head, "This whole thing is wrong, isn’t it? Never should’ve come to this. And yet here we are." He looks over his shoulder at Ornstein’s corpse. "Rest in peace, buddy."

Ciaran starts sobbing. Arty brushes tears off her cheek and leaves a crimson smear on her skin. “Fuck it. I take it back. Maybe this was going to happen no matter what. Grown-ups always say high school life is turbulent, right? That this is some sort of practice for the real world? Maybe you and him were always gonna brush me off, throw away my music when I wasn’t looking. Call me crazy behind my back.” Arty taps his temple, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the knife’s blade. “See, here’s the thing,  _my darling_ : musicians have special ears. They hear special meaning where other people don’t. Well, every time you and Ornstein made garbage can basketball out of my songs, I heard this  _noise_  in my head, and it got worse and worse and  _worse_ , and now we’re here, and he’s dead, and there’s only one way to make it  _end_ , Ciaran. Can you guess what it is?”

He removes his hand. The prom queen, pale, tear-streaked, and shaking, asks, “Wh-what is it, Arthur?”

Arty leans in, nestles his face in her hair. She smells like heaven. “You bring the house down, my muse.”

He buries the knife into her belly, muffling her screams in his shoulder, and does so again and again and again. Even once her voice fades into nothing, he beats out a rhythm in her flesh and guts until his darkness goes.

Ciaran’s torso is indistinguishable beneath over twenty stab wounds. Arty’s drenched from head to toe in blood, and he licks his lips and tastes copper and salt. Carefully feeling for any fragments the knife may have left in her corpse, he basks in the satisfaction of a successful performance and applause from the students in the

\- - -

gym looks exactly like it did ten years ago. The stage is dim and the food is long gone, but confetti and tinfoil still litters the floor. From the speakers, a song pours like sewer water.

_"Everybody cut everybody cut, everybody cut everybody cut—"_

_That’s impossible_ , Arty thinks,  _This place is dead._

With a sickening creak, the walls of the gym bend in. Arty can almost hear millions of tiny legs pounding through the veins of the structure — musician’s ear at its finest — and then he can see them. Thousands of termites crawl out of the woodwork, rushing together in rivulets. They pile over one another, working as a hive mind, and they take form. Long legs, short dress, depressions for eyes, prongs of a crown. Hundreds of writhing insects for a cavernous, yawning belly.

Arty drops his flashlight.

The beam

_cuts_

into the gloom, casting a halo onto the stage. The light coalesces in the glare, sprouting arms and glaring eyes. From its throat, sparks jump and dance out of thin air.

The doors slam shut and lock behind him.

In his entire career, none of his music has come close to describing the sheer dread coursing like shards of glass through his system. No pretty words can compare to the ticking bugs or the crackling shade. No keyboard or twist of brass or goat skin stretched taut can bring reason to what lies before him, challenging nature itself. Arty has never been more scared, and in his weakness, his darkness comes.

"What do you want with me?" he shouts. He storms a warpath toward the phantoms.  "You’re dead! I murdered you! But that was  _your_  fault! You didn’t listen to me! I had to drown it out, and you  _denied_  me that freedom!” He throws an accusing finger, face contorted with rage. “ _You brought this on yourselves!_ ”

The insects touch his hand. In an instant, they’ve swarmed onto him, crawling up his arm, beneath his clothes, against his flesh. Howling in disgust, Arty tries to fling them off, but in their magnitude their strength far outweighs his own. Columns of termites anchor him to the floor, wedge his arms into submission, and stream across his face, oblivious to his cries.

The light walks off the stage, retaining its size even as it draws closer to its source. Arty glances at its throat and quickly squeezes his eyes shut. Whatever lies within the ghost is too brilliant for him to stand. The next thing he knows, its hand is in his hair, it pulls his head back hard enough to make his neck pop, and—

"Jesus  _Christ_.”

There’s a monster on the ceiling. A monster with dozens of ruby red eyes, a maw with gnashing teeth, thick, sharp horns, and sliding, sluicing flesh. It stares down at Arty, just as Arty stares up at it. He has seen it before.

Just never  _illuminated_.

"That’s me, isn’t it," Arty murmurs, "That’s in my head. The noise. Oh my god, that’s me."

He has to act quickly, before it returns.

"Ornstein. Ciaran." The singer has to clear the lump in his throat, eyes welling with tears. The monster on the ceiling snaps its jaws at him, and his heart stops for a second. "Oh  _god_. I’m sorry. I can’t…I can’t apologize to you enough. Not only to you, but to everyone I’ve wronged. My music could just barely keep this thing away…” Wet spills down his cheek. “No more. God, please, no more.” He looks at the woman made of bugs. “I remember what I said. Do you?”

The termites relax their grip. The light lets him go.

Arty brushes himself off, gathers his breath. Ornstein’s glow can only hold off the monster for so long. It’s moving, toothy fingers digging into the wood. And then what? Doesn’t matter. It kills people. No more repeats.

The walls groan with strain as thousands of mandibles bite down.

"Hey!" Arty shouts, pointing at the ceiling, "Cthulhu’s shit stain! Talking to you, asshole!"

The monster’s answering growl  _shakes the entire building_.

"Jesus,  _everyone’s_  a fucking critic! Listen up, pal, I think you like this song!”

Arty scoops up the flashlight. Ornstein’s phantom vanishes as the shine moves. Nothing is holding the monster back now, and it shifts, preparing to pounce.

Holding the flashlight like a microphone, Arty sings.

“ _You got to turn me around—_ ”

The monster coils its tail beneath itself—

“ _And put your feet on the ground—_ ”

Arty grabs hold of his wolf tooth necklace through his shirt. Between the smokes and the drinks, how long does he have to live anyway?

“ _I’ve got a hold on my soul—_ ”

The monster roars an oppressive wave of sound that threatens to knock him off his feet, burst his ear drums, pummel him into dust—

“ _And I’m turning you loose!_ ”

Arty throws aside the flashlight, imagines the crowd he was going to please the next night, and unleashes a scream that would resonate throughout music history. Ciaran’s termites tug and yank, chew and chomp, the gym moans and creaks and splinters—

—and the house comes down in nothing less but cacophony.

\- - -

**Arthur Orias, Lead Singer Of Screamo Group “4 Knights”, Dies At 27**  
BY Henry Gough, SEPT. 29, 2014

Arthur “Arty” Orias, head of popular death metal band “4 Knights” was reported dead in Oolacile, Pennsylvania in the early hours of September 28th. Residents notified authorities the town’s condemned school campus, Nora Dolon High, had collapsed after ten years of abandonment. After clearing the debris, Mr. Orias was discovered.

Authorities confirm Mr. Orias attended the school as a teenager, and was a student at the time of a brutal double homicide.

The cause of the building’s destruction is currently unknown, though residents suggest the freak thunderstorm that occurred around the time of the collapse may have been a factor.

"I swear I saw people dancing in the sky," says Chester Marvell, a salesman passing through the town during the incident, "And I heard music on the wind. Does that make me crazy?"


End file.
